The provision of enhanced telecommunication services by service providers has raised some problematic issues with respect to the implementation of these services and customer billing therefor. Such issues have arisen in the context of certain call forwarding services and other similar telecommunication services that provide enhanced services that make use of a terminating network element such as an intelligent peripheral (IP) or a service circuit node. These types of services typically have been implemented such that a communication may be routed from an originating caller through a telecommunications network and then terminated to the terminating network element. The terminating network element then may provide for further routing of the communication to a terminating unit or provide other call treatment as appropriate.
This implementation of routing a communication to or through a terminating network element works well when the terminating unit or a call rescue location such as a voice mail service is available for connection to the communication. This implementation has a drawback when the terminating unit is busy and there is no call rescue location for connection of the communication. In that case, the terminating network element must provide answer supervision to the communication in order to provide a busy signal to the communication. With the provision of answer supervision, the connection of the communication is considered complete to the terminating network element for billing purposes. The originating caller would be billed for the communication as if it had been answered. The cost of this billing may be significant if the connection of the communication to the terminating network element is toll.
A telecommunications service provider must take steps to make sure that this billing for a call to a busy terminating unit does not occur. Pursuant to state and federal regulations of public telecommunication services, generally, an originating caller may not be billed for a call to a busy terminating unit. Thus, two unsatisfactory solutions have been devised to overcome the drawback of an originating caller being improperly billed when a communication to a busy terminating unit is answered through the provision of a busy signal by a terminating network element. The first unsatisfactory solution is that a service provider faced with an enhanced service that has this drawback has dropped this enhanced service from its portfolio of enhanced services offered to subscribers. The unsatisfactory nature of this first solution is readily apparent in that a service provider desires to offer as many and as varied enhanced services as possible to remain competitive with other service providers.
The second unsatisfactory solution is that the originating caller of the communication is not provided with any indication that the terminating unit is busy. Rather, the originating caller continues to hear ringing until the caller tires of the noise. With continuous ringing, the originating caller is not billed for a communication that was never connected to the appropriate terminating unit. Continuous ringing is an unsatisfactory solution to most subscribers for several different reasons. Business owners are unsatisfied with this solution because it may leave customers with the wrong impression. A customer who calls a business and who hears continuous ringing may deduce that the business is not service oriented with respect to customers who call the business. Business owners are especially frustrated by this because cold call customers, i.e., those customers who do not have a prior association or affiliation with the business, are unlikely to return a telephone call to a business which appears not to answer its telephone. In the private sector, a subscriber may be unsatisfied with the continuous ringing solution because it causes concern regarding the persons who are associated with the terminating unit. For example, a family member telephoning an ill or elderly parent may be concerned that the telephone line keeps ringing when the family member is relatively positive that the ill or elderly parent is present at the site of the telephone.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a solution to the drawback of the implementation wherein a communication is routed to or through a terminating network element in order to provide enhanced services to the communication, wherein the terminating unit is busy and there is no call rescue location for connection of the communication, and wherein the provision of a busy signal by the terminating network element results in a billing charge to the originating caller even though the terminating unit is busy.
There is also a need in the art for a solution to the above referenced drawback that allows a service provider to retain the enhanced services that use this implementation in its portfolio of enhanced services available for subscription.
There is a further need in the art for a solution to the above referenced drawback that does not provide continuous ringing to the originating caller as the solution to the drawback.